CRAFTSMAN WITH WORDS

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 17

CRAFTSMAN WITH WORDS

Tell me Now, and Again. By Richard Llewellyn. Michael Joseph. 284 pp. $11.60. Richard Llewellyn is a craftsman with words and with characters. The scarred East End of London — with people often equally battered — is the scene for this unsettling tale of a man and his complicated affairs and relationships. A. G. Bessell, who runs a printing business in public and is a diamond smuggle” in private, is a self-centred self-doubting bachelor with attitudes only the saintly or the deluded will not see shadowed in themselves.

He lives in a warm, snug old apartment at Daemon Wente Waye,

not far from the Whitechapel Road. The Daemon, as its tenants lovingly know it, is owned by the enigmatic Bayard Waygoes, also the top diamond racketeer. Under the veneer, hates fester and lives are cheap. Bessel) is amoral but intensely human — and his amorality is offset by a sympathy for others in trouble that leads to genuine generosity. He loves London, hates what those who care only for money are doing to the city, yet is largely content to be carried along by events. Through Llewellyn, Bessell and his friends live. This is a book to chew

over, digest, and return to. It richly repays the effort. — A. J. PETRE.